jeffreyprynce - Tumblr blog

jeffreyprynce · 8 months ago

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This was written about a year ago, posted to Substack. I’ve since migrated Substack posts to Tumblr.

Spirit of America,

My brother and I are freakishly alike. There’s a four-and-a-half year gap between us — I’m the oldest — but friends and family have remained perplexed by our similar physical traits, personal beliefs, philosophies, hopes and dreams, and other miscellaneous things that make us tick. We’re basically twins with a chunk of time between us.

Such as it is, we’ve had this… thing… where when something meaningful happens in our collective presence — something significant enough to give us pause — we look at each other. It sounds trivial, but it’s anything but. At such a time, we are indeed compelled to look at each other and hold each other’s gaze. I’ve come to refer to this as our moment.

Our moment is a phenomenon that happened often throughout our childhood as we watched shows and movies. If something particularly cool — or gruesome, in the case of horror films, which we were huge fans of then and continue to be today — happened, it would undoubtedly occur. I remember one such moment in 2000 as we watched The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen in a theatre. Immediately following the spider-walk scene, infamous at the time for its removal from all previous versions of the film (the wires used to suspend Linda Blair’s stunt double were a bit too visible, requiring computer-generated assistance for their erasure), we had a moment. I recall it vividly, that as the guttural growl and subsequent reverb of the possessed Regan MacNeil faded away, we looked at each other in the semi-dark of the theatre.

I had goosebumps. I’m sure he did, too.

It’s just like me to insert horror pop culture into a seemingly unrelated post. Ask my friends and family: you can’t talk to me for long before I bring up some paranormal or supernatural event or miscellaneous ethereal “coincidence”. You’ll have to excuse me.

The moment I’m here to really dissect is one we had on the evening of November 4, 2008. We were in Toronto, eight years out from a thirteen-year stint at trying to make a life for ourselves in the U.S. They were often good years, often tough years. They were dramatic years, frustrating years. They were years filled with the kind of ups and downs often experienced by black folks trying to thrive in America. Having thrown in the towel, even being Canadian born, we felt — my brother and I — a certain obligation to know and care about what was happening in the U.S. It was a curious sense of commitment that we harbored, and still do; that having escaped (back) to the more black-friendly north, we remained concerned about the loved ones we’d left in our dust. It was like leaving your family behind when they were in a pickle; in a third-world country, perhaps, where dreams of better places, better situations abound, or a war-torn region, where just as the enemy had begun to encroach upon your own neighborhood, you’d been scooped up and swept away to what amounted to paradise in comparison. We hurt for our good-hearted allies, of which there are many.

So it was that when Barack Obama was officially projected to be the next president-elect, we converged upon the living room that evening after dinner in our Scarborough, Ontario home, my mother and stepfather embracing on the couch, my brother and I standing, so riveted were we. And there was something about seeing Barack on that stage, with his supporters surrounding him, trying (and failing) to control the volume of their cheers in anticipation of the truly momentous speech to come. The convivial contrast of a cool November night beyond them made the image dream-like, and my brother and I had a moment. It had happened: a black president of the United States had been elected in our lifetime.

There were a number of images that came to mind in that moment, and they were all of the same theme: Martin Luther King’s dream had finally come to fruition in full. We were no longer trudging uphill, faces stonily set against cold winds emanating from cold, bigoted hearts. It was a downhill journey from that point on, no exertion needed. From that point on, the election of a black president of the United States (and a good man, an exceptional man), would carry us through to the promised land. Right?

As one Donald Trump derisively intoned as he leaned in to the microphone on his podium during a debate with Hillary Clinton, pursed lips resembling a pink puckered anus: “Wrong.”

Incidentally, I wonder if any of you remember a certain thread of discussion that was making the rounds on social media platforms just after his election. It can be summarized essentially thus: Black folks been knew, and white folks didn’t listen to us; have never listened to us.

Immediately post-election, all over Twitter, black folks young and old were nodding and smirking and shaking their heads, saying, “We warned you.” And with some context and education, you came to know what we meant then, but I fear you’ve since forgotten, that what’s happening to your country right now is, quite literally, all about race. Had you heeded our collective call that white nationalist racism was coming to a boil, and that the nation was the proverbial frog thus slowly, insidiously being cooked, you could’ve mobilized. You could’ve prodded that frog; gave it a little poke; jump, Mr. Toad, jump.

Here you have Donald Trump at an about-face. He’s back. And I don’t think it’s going to be a landslide victory for the Democratic Party come November, if it does manage a victory. If the Democrats do win, it’ll be a victory they eked out; a tight squeal, like that thin, wounded sound that seeps from the pinched orifice of a balloon.

I do pray that you won’t wake up on November 6, 2024 with Donald Trump as your revenge president-elect. I pray he won’t spider-walk into your lives as commander-in-chief once again. Though, do take heed that after an exorcism, the exorcee is grandly advised by the exorcist, himself weary and battle-scarred, to be spiritually on the defensive. Always. Because he knows that if the demon returns, it won’t come alone; it’ll come with seven others. Seven devils. And the state of the body again possessed will be worse than it was the first time. Much worse.

In an architectural sense, do not be mistaken: Donald Trump’s reign over the Republican Party is not being held up by politics. It is not being propped up by a desire for a better future for all Americans. It is not innocent. It is being propped up by a hatred for people who are not white. Yes, it is indeed that simple. If you think otherwise, ask yourself this: If you could rewind society to what it was in, let’s say, the late 1980s, when cultural and racial diversity were less visible and whiteness was the order of the day everywhere you looked, do you think Donald Trump would be on the ballot, let alone seeking a second term?

I don’t think so.

I think Donald Trump would be in New York, doing Donald Trump things; wheeling and dealing in real estate, managing hotels and casinos, running fake establishments (universities, et al.), appearing on WWE Smackdown, that sort of thing. As it is, in today’s society, he is a living martyr and a wrecking ball for the kind of people who get together to uniformly wear Polo shirts and clutch tiki torches, chanting, “You will not replace us!”

For further clarity, look no further than the words of Toni Morrison, as they appeared in The New Yorker ten days after Donald Trump was first elected:

“These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

“It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others — especially to black people — they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.”

Morrison wrote of the extremes white nationalists have gone to in an attempt to “restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity”. She wrote that “Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force” and that “These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.” Given that she wrote the essay in response to Trump’s election, you’d do best to print it out and pin it to your wall or your fridge, or, at the very least, to fold it up and tuck it into a folder or journal for easy reference when your conservative peers and/or family members say or do things that confound you.

Only when you understand this and accept it will you have a chance at staving off the storm Trump is riding in on, like some apocalyptic herald. Because when you’ve accepted it, you’ll see it all around you. Little fires everywhere. Then and only then will you be able to stamp them out before they conjoin. With your friends. With your family. And, most importantly, those independent voters, the ones on the fence who will see the Republican Party for the repugnant, shambling thing it has become, and subsequently tip the scales.

As of my writing this, there’s still time. The drive to suffocate racism in America is the banner under which you’ll find victory; if not for this election, for the soul of your nation. I shudder to think of how a vengeful second term of Trump in the White House will affect the conflicts in Gaza and the Ukraine, for example, or South Sudan, Ecuador, the Congo. And I'd be remiss to remind you that in terms of the bloodshed in Gaza, of the two candidates, Donald Trump is the one who is least bendable in terms of seeking to end the wholesale murder of innocent Palestinian people. While Harris is prone to listening to those of us who plead for Palestinians, and prone to scolding Netanyahu as Biden did ("Bibi, what the fuck?"), Trump is not. Quite the contrary, Trump has said he will side with Benjamin Netanyahu unwaveringly.

Lately, when my brother and I see each other, now as Canadian men having mostly recovered from the constant, hovering threat of racist white Americans, we inevitably have our moments about what antics Trump has been up to. We never have much to say about him and his enablers anymore. Not like we did in 2016. Because there’s nothing new under the sun, is there? What we understand is that y’all still aren’t getting it. We handed you the keys and you fumbled them once again, unaware that they’d long since tumbled into that cold, damp manhole sewer of blissful American ignorance.

And yet I wish the best for you. I hope for a miracle, fingers and toes crossed, prayers up, and incense lit.

From Canada with love,

Your Wayward Son

#usa #politics #election 2024 #us elections #donald trump #kamala harris #kamala 2024 #maga 2024 #dark academia

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